Wangari Maathai said these goals are fundamentally linked to environmental awareness and restoration. You simply can’t achieve them without a sustainable culture and a healthy environment.
In Kenya women are the first victims of environmental degradation, because they are the ones who walk for hours looking for water, who fetch firewood, who provide food for their families. --Wangari Maathai
She believed (and pretty much proved, in my opinion) that if you want self-determination and education for women, you have to plant trees. Women’s rights in the third world depend on environmentalism, and vice versa.
And I’m trying to make the point that physical reality trumps political pragmatism.
Is achieving rapid decarbonisation in the current circumstances so politically difficult as to be almost impossible? Yes. Is achieving this rapid decarbonisation required for survival? Also yes.
It’s possible someone will come at the problem from the other direction. A genetically engineered disease that wiped out 80% of the world’s population would go a long way towards reducing energy demand. Maybe the survivors would learn their lessons and avoid making the exact same mistakes, or maybe it would just buy time. Either way, we seem to be a lot farther along the tech tree towards that technology than usable fusion or the ability to radically restructure the world’s economy wholesale against the interests of those who currently control it.
From a carbon POV, burning the wood is no worse than leaving it to rot, except in the indirect sense that nutrients from unburnt wood replenish the soil and feed the bugs, aiding the growth of replacement trees.
But what wilderness campfires do create is fire scars / dead zones. Especially in high or dry country, those can last for decades. If you can, try to keep your fires in established and recently-used locations.
My source is not very good but I remember hearing of France that something of a limit has been hit in terms of sites for building nuclear plants that have a sufficiently dependable water supply for cooling. In fact the worry is that, as climate destabilises into more extreme drought/flood cycles, the continued operation of existing plants becomes precarious.
Like I say though, that’s at least third hand information.
No? I would have thought the conservative information dissemination and political decision making system was pretty well understood by now. If you want them to vote for something, first you need to bribe Pat Robertson. Then a few other key religious celebrities. They won’t be cheap, but they are definitely for sale.
Modern economic methods have substantially detached the price of food from the cost of production; subsidies and stockpiles, for the most obvious. Climate change is going to reduce the food supply whether or not we shift away from fossil fuels, but we currently have a large food surplus.
An increase in the cost of food production does not necessarily mean an increase in the price of food. Americans are already eating a massively subsidized diet.
I did some cursory research (mostly this doc and also the cites on the wiki article for ‘Agricultural subsidy’), and found that, in the US, government food subsidies are about $15 billion per year. Total spending on food is about $700 billion per year, of which $400 billion is agricultural products sold. That doesn’t make it sound like food is massively subsidized, overall. But I’m open to learning more on this subject, if you can explain how it really works. Would people be paying very different prices for food, if there were no agricultural subsidies? Do they serve to level out fluctuations in prices?
That’s a badly designed graph. The horizontal logarithmic (ish) scale makes it very unclear to see the scale of variations. It makes it seem as if the current warming is mild compared to the previous ones (while the opposite is true)
I was thinking of the effects of stockpiling and producer co-ops/cartels as well as agricultural subsidies; food prices are manipulated in both directions. And I wasn’t thinking of just the USA.
The general point was just that food prices are not set by classical supply/demand economics; they are constantly manipulated and controlled, and not just in avowedly socialist countries. If we can fiddle the prices for carbon-powered agriculture, we can also fiddle the prices for non-carbon-powered agriculture.
I’m not saying that there aren’t costs involved. But a claim that “anything that increases the cost of agriculture inevitably increases the retail price of food” just isn’t true. And “any reduction in agricultural productivity will inevitably cause starvation” is also false.
Modern famine is the result of uneven food distribution, not inadequate food production.
afaik the summer of 2003, with a long and massive heatwave, was so far the worst - EDF had to reduce the power output by around 4 GW (of 60 GW in total). Not a big deal as percentage but rather bad for the grid stability.
But that’s only one issue with the reactors in France - nuclear plants are excellent for base load but suckers when it comes to load following. with about 2/3 nuclear power generation the plants are not used to capacity as they have to be used as (ineffective) load following plants, and the fixed costs are rather high.
France imports (cold winters, electric heating is common) and exports (plants are too slow to lower the output) lots of electricity - more often than not at a bad price level, and the national grid is a pain to regulate (mostly base load plants, nearly no peaking power ones).
The Conseil d’État (highest administrative court in France*) ordered EDF to increase the prices, they used dumping prices far below the production costs of the energy.
* EDF is effectively controlled by the government and it was an administrative decision to keep the prices too low. if anyone wonders why this court was responsible
Now it’s too late for a gradual shift. Decarbonise or die.
Yet we won’t decarbonize. Mostly because we won’t die right now. As long as we can rationalize that this can be someone else’s problem or someone much smarter than us will come up with a solution, we will be more concerned with the minutia of daily life.
Besides thinking about sudden a zombie apocalypse that will destroy life as we know it is much sexier then a rather slow (by our perspective) and enviable (because we feel screwed whatever we do) disaster of our own making.
From the perspective that methods of social organization and long-distance transport are themselves technologies, this does not seem like a significant difference. It’s not clear that distributing food is or should be any easier than producing it in the first place. (Both transport and social hierarchies are predicated on the energy supplied by fossil fuels.)
Your point about subsidies is pretty much completely incorrect, I think. If those food subsidies are ultimately derived from taxes on fossil fuels, then decarbonization will also do away with the subsidies, and so we can’t count on them to keep food prices low under decreased supply. And basic supply and demand – if the subsidies don’t increase (where do the additional subsidies come from?) then price of food will still increase.
Let’s zoom out a little. Decarbonizing the economy means losing all the productivity derived from using fossil fuels to leverage human labor. There’s no aspect of the economy that will become more productive without fossil fuels. So where can the subsidies possibly come from? No matter what you do, a greater share of your economic activity is spent on food. More people are farming and they spend more time doing it. You can subsidize food production, but that just means that some person doing some non-farming work is also devoting extra time to agricultural production, albeit indirectly. This is exactly the same as an increase in the price of food.
Well, historically speaking, it is mild so far, isn’t it? It’s the velocity (first derivative) and the fact that we are the cause that’s differentiates this warming cycle, no?
What’s your alternative for baseline power generation?
Solar? Only works during the day, and power fluctuates based on how cloudy it gets. Also the expense isn’t trivial.
Wind? Only works when it’s windy, and power fluctuates depending on the strength of the wind.
Geo, hyrdothermal, you name it: All have drawbacks and limitations or are just plain not going to work in certain areas. Not everyone lives in Iceland or Hawaii. A robust carbon-neutral grid that meet our electricity demands today needs to incorporate nuclear. And if/when we move to carbon neutral transportation, that baseline goes up, not down.
You think that this discussion is about how fission plants are perfect. It’s not. It’s about how we don’t have other options.
There is none. We’ll have to deal with having less power.
My case against nuclear is not predicated on there being a better option out there for maintaining BAU.
Nowhere did I advocate for renewables as alternatives to nuclear. In fact, if you bother to read my comments, you’ll see I did just the opposite and described several of the many problems with renewables.
No, I do NOT think this is about how fission plants are perfect. Nowhere did I claim that or imply it, and if there was any uncertainty about whether that’s what I was claiming, you might have asked.
My case is about how nuclear isn’t really as much of an option as you claim it is:
Making nuclear work at all necessitates exacerbating the global warming problem. Is it worth trying to maintain our current levels of power usage given that doing so will actually worsen the problem we’re ostensibly trying to solve? Is it worth killing the patient to cure the disease, in other words?
Expanding the nuclear industry means expanding the volume of waste byproducts of that industry. That waste poses a serious hazard if mankind ever fails to maintain the technological infrastructure needed to safely contain it. That means that expanding the nuclear industry increases the risks involved with collapse of industrial society. If there is a non-zero chance of industrial society collapsing, might it not make sense to constrain our output of nuclear waste to exert how bad the downside of that scenario could possibly be?
I’d appreciate if you could answer the questions I previously posed – I did pose them in the spirit of good faith discussion.
Interesting. It’s not an argument I’m very comfortable with. Particularly because, in the US at least, agricultural subsidies are one of those rare areas where the left and the right should be able to agree to reforms. The only people who like these subsidies are agribusinesses, and pretty much no one thinks we need to be padding their profits.
So for that reason, I am hopeful that they could be done away with without making food a lot more expensive. I had never considered the argument you’re making. I think I tend to agree with @wysinwyg that the level of subsidies, currently, doesn’t tell us anything about how much more we would have to spend in order to keep prices stable, if the costs to producers were to go up.
